Comes a time to break down an organization so embedded in its own sense of self that even the witnessing of a 10 year old child being raped in a shower does no prompt anyone to call the cops.

From what I’ve been reading, Paterno reported what happened to his bosses, but then never bothered to follow up, challenge Sandusky, make anything happen, or show any sense of disbelief or disgust. How does one go on to work with someone he knows is a pedophile?

As a former art student who studied in a building that should have been condemned while a sparkling new football stadium was being built, I think the time to evaluate priorities is long overdue. Entertainment over education is not where our college monies need to go.

Imagine the boy in the shower who thought he had been saved only to see a full grown man turn and run, leaving him to his torture. How does he ever trust anyone again?

I keep wondering what kind of creep hears about a grown man in a shower with a boy and thinks it might not be any big deal.

I can only come up with two possible answers:
1. Another baby rapist.
2. A moronic coward.

Neither kind of person has ANY place in education.

It’s time to make college football be something sponsored and supported by the organization that truly benefits from it: the NFL. 

It irritates the crap out of me that colleges, even those with minor league teams, spend so much on football while the quality and availability of education continues to decline in this country. 

Allow me to lean back in my rockin’ chair and tell ya’all a story.  The local, just turned to a 4 year college that I went to out of high school had a football team.  The college newspaper broke the news that 73% of the $100 or so dollars each student paid as student fees each semester went to support the football team; damn near caused a riot.  Unfortunately it didn’t change anything, and classrooms continued to be short of needed equipment and materials.  The football team had everything it wanted though.

It’s time to make college football be something sponsored and supported by the organization that truly benefits from it: the NFL.

The NCAA would never let this happen, if only because they’d have to finally admit that D1 football is nothing more than a farm system for the pros.

I also went to a school that gave the football program everything while ignoring the rest of the university, and it still does the same now.  I was a huge fan of the university till I actually went there; now you couldn’t pay me to say a good thing about them.

The NCAA would never let this happen, if only because they’d have to finally admit that D1 football is nothing more than a farm system for the pros.

Exactly.  And that’s why the whole system is corrupt, as Midge pointed out.  It would be much more honest to pay these student athletes than it is to exploit them, plus do behind the scenes payoffs and other corrupting things, than it is to profit hugely from their efforts and give them a worthless degree (since they really were just there to play ball, usually not going to classes and unfortunately not going on to the NFL either).  That’s certainly true of the big college programs that actually do make money via ticket sales/TV rights/alumni squeezing via ticket sales/etc.  At the small colleges like the first one I went to, it is simply obscene to starve academics for football programs that are barely even on the radar, much less ever having a chance to be self-sufficient. 

I also would argue that it takes some real stretching of the concept of self sufficient, since I doubt that the cost of the stadiums/facilities/maintenance/operations is factored in to whether a program makes money or not.  The little college I went to had a totally self-sufficient theatre program (not many other live outlets in that bit of middle-O-nowhere), but they sure didn’t receive the boosterism that the money pit football team did.

NCAA football does operate as the NFL’s farm team, and as y’all suggested, one solution would be to openly treat it as such and force the teams to pay the players, etc. It would be better than what we have now, but it seems to me we’d lose the “amateur, student-athlete” angle, which, while certainly not the case now, might have value in some superior universe.

Here’s an alternate pipe-dream: return to a yesteryear that probably never really was. Rip out the luxury boxes and make everyone sit on the same crappy concrete seats. Current students get the first crack at tickets, and everyone else gets first-come, first-served, randomly assigned seating right out there in the sun, snow or rain with everyone else. No one inherits 50-yard-line seats in Granddaddy’s will. The stadium is named after the goddamned school. No special dorms, treatment or programs—you can either pass the same test everyone else does to get in, or you’re SOL, and if you get a D, you either fix it right away, or you’re out.

This would get the fat cat boosters out of it, at least the less hardy ones. They are as big a problem as NFL-$$$-hungry agents, IMO. It would also churn out less reliably NFL-ready players, in which case the NFL can build an honest farm team system to transition players from college to pros, letting the less-gifted sons-a-bitches make a little money on it and entertain small-market football fans before shuffling off to a shift management gig at Taco Bell.

Ling comment alert

I’m gonna get a bit ageist here because Paterno, a doddering, seemingly barely sentient shell of his former self has just canceled the weekly press conference. They hold one every Tuesday and Joe stumbles out, strains to hear the questions being asked then mumbles incoherently for an answer.

But today, informed that there were hundreds of reporters waiting and not willing to focus solely on Saturday’s game against Nebraska (former coach Tom Osborne built an insular and wildly successful program there, a program noted, particularly in his later years, for the criminality of its players—rape, sexual assault, domestic battery, robbery) and would query Joe about the sexual predator he worked with for 30 years, he canceled.

The Atlantic piece details how the players are exploited, but there are two other angles that have been dancing around my nearly-empty skull for the past 36 hours or so.

The first, as I mentioned above, is a good corollary with Nebraska, a small, state school in the middle of nowhere, insulated and self-contained, that became home to one college football’s most successful programs. Penn State, when Paterno took over 62 years ago was nothing more than a small state school known for its agricultural program, not its football team.

In both instances success on the football field brought attention, that attention brought boosters wanting in on success and advertisers looking to exploit loyal, captive audiences and that meant money. As TV grew the sport grew and that meant more money and now we have the BCS, nothing more than a money-making endeavor for the nation’s richest and largest football programs.

College presidents played along, because goddammit when one school program can bring home a 14-million dollar check for three hours of play, well, that’s good business.

Betty mentions it above and it’s going to become the go-to disclaimer when discussing Paterno and this scandal—he built that campus. He built the library. He did focus on education, on character on discipline. He’s arguably one of the most influential men in the state and on that campus if JoePa had said in 2002—something very bad has happened, get on it and find out—the whole fucking law enforcement apparatus from the state to the locals would have jumped to.

Paterno didn’t do that and that means more boys were sexually molested or raped by a predator. They turned in on themselves, washed their hands and walked away.

Oh, if it all sounds so fucking familiar, so grossly frustrating, my second comparison was with another insular, powerful institution more concerned with its power, it prestige and its position—the Catholic church.

The photo on the book cover is pretty disturbing as well.

And I’m kinda glad that I ended up getting my degree (and now teach adjunct) at a school with no college athletic program whatsoever. Not that we don’t have our own share of problems, mind you.

He’s arguably one of the most influential men in the state and on that campus if JoePa had said in 2002—something very bad has happened, get on it and find out—the whole fucking law enforcement apparatus from the state to the locals would have jumped to.

I agree 100%, I’ve brought this up on a few sports blogs this week.  Before this scandal broke, he was the most powerful man in Pennsylvania.  He didn’t need to go through any “channels” or make sure he followed “university protocol”.  Paterno IS the channel, he’s a political/academic/financial power unto himself. 

It’s funny how many of these “legendary” coaches always seem to stick around just a few years too long:

Woody Hayes
Don James
Bobby Knight
Barry Switzer
Bobby Bowden

I think Osbourne is a good comparison too.  Only in Nebraska could he preside over a scandal-ridden program and then get elected to the US House!